Widescreen Video Embedding with Simple Video Embedder Plugin

Thanks to Jason Schuller’s easy-to-implement video embedding plugin, Gallery now supports video embedding from popular video sites like YouTube and Vimeo, even allowing you to add your own custom code if not supported. This is an awesome addition to Gallery and I even created a new icon for posts with video so you can differentiate between regular posts and video posts. You will want to download Simple Video Embedder from Press75.com to take advantage of this beautiful plugin. I believe it is also available from WordPress.org, so you can install this via the WordPress admin, just search for the title and off you go.

Added Single-Level Drop-Down Styles

This may seem pretty basic and very 1.0, but it was overlooked in previous versions and now you may add sub-categories with great joy and zeal. Enjoy.

Updated CSS & Image Sizes

A lot of people had issues either with thumbnails not being styled properly after changing their homepage to a single page or something similar and also with the size of the “Full Image” being set at 500×375. With this update, you no longer are required to use a fixed 500×375 image. As long as it is LESS THAN 500px wide, it will show up properly, anything larger and it will jack up the page. You asked for it, I gave it to you, don’t be a fool. Stay in school. Or something. In addition, the guys from Thematic added a “not-singular” class to their list of class names for pages in order to satisfy one of my needs with Gallery, the need to display thumbnail grids without having to specify 5 different page layout classes that could possibly change or be broken at any time. This basically fixes a bug in Gallery which was caused by an inflexibility in Thematic, which was fixed in the latest Thematic release.

Removed all Page Templates from Theme Folder

Basically, with the latest version of Thematic, Gallery does not need ANY page templates to function properly, instead utilizing ‘functions.php’ to insert, modify, and remove stuff from Thematic as necessary. This means you can upgrade Thematic or Gallery independently, without worrying about breaking either of them (hopefully).

NOTE: When upgrading Gallery, you will need to COMPLETELY REMOVE THE OLD GALLERY THEME FOLDER.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it, an updated version of Gallery. I’d like to thank Ian Stewart and Chris Gossman for their support of this theme and for providing the rock-solid Thematic Framework, which basically kicks all other frameworks’ butts, especially Thesis, which blows (actually, I’ve never used it, I’m just trying to start a fight .

Comments? Rock them out below and I will try to answer them, though I will admit due to a high level of comments and emails I may never respond to you. However, I do read all comments, which is good.

With the “smashing” success of Gallery 1.0 I am happy to announce the release of version 1.1, which includes quite a few changes, including a custom write panel (shown below), bugfixes for IE6 (mainly the navigation menu), and other bugfixes. As always, you need to grab and upload both the Gallery and Thematic themes.

Custom Write Panel

At the request of a commenter on Smashing Magazine’s release post, I have added a custom write panel, which streamlines the process of adding new posts by giving you a new section with your custom fields pre-defined and ready to be populated.

Custom Write Panels Make Life Easy

List of updates and bugfixes:

• Next/Previous buttons changed to basic links to avoid breaking long names
• ‘New’ icons no longer being cut off on top
• Custom field entry changed to custom write panel
• functions.php – remove sidebar instead of hiding it for non-pages.
• Single page images were only allowed to use a relative path, now allow for relative or absolute
• IE6 update, menu displays horizontally
• IE6 update, space between thumbnail rows eliminated
• Single page image container no longer cut off on left side
• Other minor CSS updates